


Medicine

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [35]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-03 01:16:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11521494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: While Toast and Capable make speeches, Cheedo walks deep into the Citadel, where a Wife has never gone before.





	1. Chapter 1

Cheedo put Furiosa’s head in her lap, marveling at how soft her skin was, worried at the heat that radiated from the Imperator like steam from an engine. “What do we do?” she whispered to Jiemba, who trembled on the back of her neck. “What do we _do_?”

Toast had stepped up to hold the others away, to point guns at people and demand to be heard. But none of it would matter if Furiosa died here. All of them knew how close death stalked the people of the Wasteland; Max’s blood would mean nothing if they couldn’t get her to _breathe._

“Hold her head up, like that, good.” Annie’s gnarled hands came to rest alongside Cheedo’s, touched Furiosa’s forehead, her bandaged ribs, her swollen eye. “Clear the airways. Turn her head, there you go.”

“Is the Imperator dead?” It was a little Pup, black-lined eyes big in his skeleton face, crouching down to whisper with them while Toast and Capable fought with words for their lives. His daemon was a praying mantis clinging to his shoulder, dusted with white chalk just like he was.

“No son, just hurt badly,” Annie answered when Cheedo couldn’t. “Tell me, have you got any medicine around here? Bandages and suchlike?”

The Pup leaned back to elbow a couple of his mates. “Ought to take her to the Blood Shed,” he said to both the women and the other Pups. When the other two looked back at Toast and Capable, he hissed, “It’s _Furiosa_. You want to let her sit in the sun like this?” There was a short shoving match between them that had Cheedo flinching away—she had never seen fighting that was not in deadly earnest.

“Let’s _go_ ,” the Pups tumbled to a stop as quickly as they’d started. Where there had been three, suddenly there were ten, and all of them were reaching out to tug at Furiosa’s shirt, at Cheedo’s hands, at Annie’s braids. “This way,” they whispered. “This way.”One of them reached out to pick up her daemon with his bare hands.

“Don’t!” Cheedo reached out to grab his wrist, as startled as the Pup at her own bravery. “Don’t touch someone else’s daemon.” The Pup sat back and stared at her, eyes wide. Before the Road War, Cheedo would have looked away. Even the curiosity of so small a Pup would have frightened her back into her shell. But she had faced down Rock Riders, and Crow Fishers, and she had stood on the Rig to trick Rictus Erectus. She thought of all that, and it was the Pup who looked away first.

Annie’s sea eagle waddled over to them, his long claws awkward on the wood flooring of the lift. “I’ll take him.” The Pup backed away from the war bird slowly, his own daemon a salamander huddled along his human’s bare foot.


	2. Chapter 2

The trip was every nightmare story Cheedo had ever heard about the Citadel. It was dark and stinking and filthy. But it was also raucous with the joy of the Wretched, and Annie’s reassuring shadow on her right made it bearable. She tucked herself close to the witch, held on to Furiosa, and waded through the mad euphoria.

Cheedo had never been to the Blood Shed. Had never even heard of it, before today. The place was thick with the slimy stink of the Organic Mechanic, full of rotten blood and burning bone. She couldn’t stop herself from gagging, from flinching at remembered pain. The Pups only looked at her curiously—Annie didn’t spare her any attention at all.

“What the— _this_ is where you do your healing?” The witch threw her voice across the room, silencing the murmur of blood bags and War Boys close to death. “What kind of a man—never mind that. Lay her down somewhere clean, I said somewhere _clean._ For the sake of the Mothers, spread out some cloth or something.”

Cheedo hung back, feeling her breath stick in her throat as Furiosa groaned. The sea-eagle set down Furiosa’s daemon on the rock shelf next to her, where she shared space with two unconscious War Boys and a man in a cage above them. The man looked down with his hands on the bars, his face thin and ragged like one of the Wretched. He was ugly, like everything in the Wasteland. Cheedo was not brave for stepping up onto that shelf. She was not kind or powerful or anything like Angharad. She was just tired of seeing people hurt because of Joe. While Annie kept up her monologue and the Pups brought her the best of the Organic’s ingredients, Cheedo hauled on the chains that kept the iron cage hanging. She brought it down on the ledge above Furiosa’s and heaved it onto its side.

“Who—who—who are you?” The blood bag stuttered, still chained by his feet to the top of the cage. Cheedo felt Jiemba fling himself off her back, looking for bolt cutters. She knelt to ease the blood bag off the harsh edges of the cage, to pull him free and sit him up against the back wall of the Shed.

This place was different from the lift. No one was watching her here, not like the others had watched Toast and Capable. Cheedo pulled clean black hair out of her eyes and wondered what to say. “I’m Cheedo. I am—I was a Wife. Furiosa rescued us, and then we came back, and she _killed_ Him. Joe. He’s dead, and we came back to make it right. To make the Citadel into a new Green Place.” She whispered half the words and barely breathed the rest. It still felt dangerous, to say such things. It felt deadly to mean them. But the blood bag only smiled a Wretched sort of smile, and then Jiemba was landing next to her with a heavy file in his claws.

On her third cage, someone tried to stop her. A War Boy with his face half torn away, his teeth flashing angrily with every breath he took, put his hands on the chain and yanked it away from her. Cheedo fell back a step, startled. His flesh was glowing red with infection, where it wasn’t still painted chalk white. He snarled at her and almost fell over where he stood. A thick needle and tube was plugged in at his collarbone. “What’d you think you’re doing, breeder?” Without proper lips to hold it in, he spit and drooled with every word. “You’re too shine and soft to belong back here with us half-lives. I can fix that.”

She thought she was afraid, for a moment. It felt like reading the alethiometer for Joe had been, dreading the answer as much as the question. But with the alethiometer, she had never known what the answer would be before it came. At least here, she knew herself clever enough to fool Rictus Erectus, strong enough to stand at the edge of the Plains of Silence without flinching, and witch enough to wear Vuvalini bands on her wrists and hair and ankles. So she stepped up to the lip of the stone, where she was taller than he was, and took back the chain with a quick jerk.

“My name is Cheedo,” she told him, and Jiemba fluttered to hang from her vest. “I am not a breeder because I am not a thing. Joe is dead and his Imperators with him. The Citadel doesn’t belong to you anymore.”

“I’ll say what does belong to me!” the War Boy growled, and reached for her. Cheedo didn’t mean to make him fall—she only stepped away again, pushed a loose rock forward under her bare feet. The fever-sick War Boy caught his knee on it, trying to climb up to her, and slipped badly on the blood-wet stone. He landed with a crisp _snap_ of broken bone, his arm or leg maybe. Cheedo didn’t look. She hauled the cage down to the ledge instead, set to work with the file Jiemba had given her, and paid the War Boy no more attention. He wasn’t really a War Boy any more. None of them could be.


End file.
